Thursday, February 22, 2007

Headliners

I've got this fixation on bad writing. I think it's curable, and I hear there's a vacancy in Brittney Spears'* rehabilitation center. Meanwhile:

The Saipan Tribune probably can't be blamed for
Size of govt on the decline. It's obvious that some rogues from the PSS Central Office hacked into their computer and substituted education-speak for Government getting smaller.

Note to file: Unless you're talking about a streaker, your mind is in neutral when you use bared in a headline:
Names of candidates for NMC presidency bared

Of course educators in the classroom have to worry about communicating. While it's always great to use local papers, I wouldn't recommend using the Tribune with students learning English as a second language without screening its headlines:

Scarlet gourd-chomping insect now number a million on Rota Insects or numbers please. I'm just glad I didn't have to count them.

We've got a double in
2 former tour boat crews sue ex-employers! Do you really have to put former and ex-employers in the same sentence? Was each man a crew? I don't even want to get into the story. "Employees of a tour boat" indeed. At least the paper tried to talk to them, but it was speechless, I guess.

We can't neglect
Wiseman finds probable cause vs 4 men in copper wire theft". Now, abbreviations should be avoided when possible anyway, but especially when you don't know what they mean. It's possible Judge Wiseman has already made up his mind and a trial really isn't necessary, but I don't think so. After all, the paper did say that the men "were charged for cutting and stealing the Commonwealth Utilities Corp.'s power lines on Jan. 17, 2007." Sounds like a slam-dunk to me. Or, there's a new Attorney General named Probable Cause who filed the charges.

* Lawdy, somebody has got to keep razors away from that girl. Why first she shaved... Well, don't mind me. There I go carrying on again.

4 comments:

Angelo Villagomez said...

Please, God, please don't start critiquing my writing. I only learned how to spell, thier, I mean their, last week.

KAP said...

Theirs a big difference between righting on a blog and in a newspaper. Blog--spontaneous thoughts, lame ideas Newspaper--facts, public record and communicating clearly. That's why there are supposed to be two or even three people in the process.

I understand why people say trashes and garbages, but believe a newspaper should gently remind them it ain't that way.

The local wage system is part of the problem, of course...

Anonymous said...

The titles of the news are written by editors, not the reporters, mind you. We should let them know these errors. I pity the reporters that errors in writing could be directly blamed on them.

KAP said...

I picked on the editors because they're supposed to be helping the writers.